Page 23

He didn’t let them go.

Not when the rest of the squad swept the house. Not when they called for exfil. Not even during the bone-rattling ride back to base in the MRAP, the girls curled tight in his lap, tiny fingers still fisted in his uniform as if letting go would make the nightmare return.

Only when they reached the aid station and a cluster of female nurses and doctors rushed forward did Cal finally loosen his hold. He eased the girls into their arms with a quiet, rough murmur—“You’re safe now, sweethearts. They’ve got you.”—but his eyes stayed locked on them until the last second, like he was daring the whole damn war to try and take them back.

As he held this young girl in the diner it was as if time had slowed and he was back there again knowing that terrible injustice had been inflicted on her and he needed to help. He would be the wall between her and anything else that would harm her.

Sage weighed almost nothing in his arms — a hundred and sixty some pounds of fever, trembling, and all the wreckage she’d been carrying for years — yet she was the heaviest thing he’d ever held. He could bench four hundred pounds without warming up, but this girl sobbing “mama” into his chest made his knees want to buckle. His hands stayed gentle on her back, almost reverent, while every cell in his body roared with the need to hunt down whoever had done this and unmake them slowly, savagely, until nothing was left.

He breathed.

Not now Cal. Her first.

The rage was vast. Cold. The old, operational kind that lived in the void where the weapon slept, precise and patient and utterly without mercy. It would wait. It was very very good at waiting. Right now the girl needed steady hands and a quiet voice and the simple, radical act of not being the thing she expected him to be.

The diner had gone silent.

He felt the weight of every eye in the room, the held breath of twenty people who had just witnessed something they would talk about for years. Annie was standing by the counter with tears on her face and one hand pressed against her chest. The Halverson sisters were clutching each other. Frank Delaney had put down his crossword and was staring at his coffee, his expression looked like a man who was trying very hard not to feel something and failing. Bobby Callahan Sr., the stubborn old school rancher looked ready to gather a posse and hunt down the son of a bitch who hurt this girl.

Cal didn’t look at any of them.

He looked at Mama. One look. The look that said I’ve got her and I’ll be back and don’t worry in that same language they’d been speaking for a long time.

Mary Sue read it. Nodded. Her eyes were wet and furious and proud all at once.

Cal carried Sage toward the door.

She’d gone limp in his arms…not unconscious, but past fighting, past speech. Her face stayed buried against his chest, hands curled tight into his flannel like it was the only solid thing left in her world. Her breath came in soft, hiccupping aftershocks, the last tremors of sobs that had wrung her completely dry. She was shivering hard enough that he felt it in his own bones: deep, bone-deep tremors from a body that had been cold for too long, sick for too long, terrified for too long… and had finally run out of ways to keep pretending it wasn’t breaking.

He shifted her easily to one arm — his left, bracing her against his torso, her weight distributed across his forearm and bicep without effort — and opened the door with his right.

The cold hit. Ten degrees and dropping, the wind driving snow sideways across Main Street with the mindless persistence of a Montana blizzard still gathering strength. He stepped into it and angled his body, shoulders squared, Sage tucked against the leeward side of his massive frame, blocking the wind and the snow with the same instinct he’d used to block incoming fire in corridors and doorways. She was small enough that his body covered her almost entirely.

With his free hand, he hit the remote start. The F-350 roared to life sixty feet away, headlights cutting through the snow, heaters engaging with the immediate, aggressive warmth of a vehicle that had been engineered to treat things like cold as a personal insult.

Sage was mumbling.

The words came out fever-loose and tangled, and seemed to be sliding between present and past with the disoriented fluidity of a mind that had lost its grip on which was which. Her head moved against his chest. Her eyes were closed but she wasn’t sleeping. She was somewhere else, somewhere inside, somewhere the fever seemed to have unlocked.

“Mom… why did you die?” A whisper. Raw. The voice of a child, not a women. “He’s going to hurt me again…”

Bear’s jaw set. The muscle jumped once. Twice.

Come on Cal! Move.

He kept walking.

“Shh, sweetheart.” Low. Steady. The voice he’d used to talk down hostages and calm wounded teammates and guide panicked assets through extraction corridors in the dark. The voice that cost him everything to keep even and nothing to maintain, because this was what he was built for. Not the killing. The holding. “I got you.”

He opened the passenger door. Set her on the seat with a care that bordered on surgical — one hand supporting her head, the other guiding her body down, every point of contact deliberate and gentle, his scarred fingers careful over the curve of her shoulders and the trembling line of her back. She was burning up. He could feel the fever through her hoodie, radiating off her skin like heat off asphalt.

He reached across her for the seatbelt. Drew it slowly across her body, clicked it home. She stirred — her eyes opening, unfocused, the pupils dilated and glassy. She looked around the cab with the wild, disoriented panic of someone waking up in a place they don’t recognize.

Her gaze found him. Standing in the open door, snow accumulating on his shoulders, filling the doorframe.

“W-wait,” she whispered.

He waited as the blizzard roared behind him.